About Startup Weekend

Startup Weekend is a 54-hour event designed to provide superior experiential education for technical and non-technical aspiring entrepreneurs. Beginning with Friday night pitches and continuing through brainstorming, business model creation, market validation, and basic prototype creation, Startup Weekend culminates with Sunday night demonstrations and presentations. Participants create working startups during the event and are able to collaborate with like-minded individuals outside of their daily networks. All teams hear talks by industry leaders and receive valuable feedback from local entrepreneurs. The weekend is centered around action, innovation, and education. Whether you are looking for feedback on a idea, a co-founder, specific skill sets, or a team to help you execute, Startup Weekends are the perfect environment in which to test your idea and take the first steps towards launching your own startup.

SLAVA RUBIN

Slava Rubin is CEO and co-founder of Indiegogo, the world's largest global crowdfunding platform. Indiegogo empowers anyone, anywhere, anytime to raise funds for any idea—creative, cause-related or entrepreneurial. Since launching in January 2008, the company has embraced an open model, helping people create campaigns in every country around the world, and is now distributing millions of dollars across the platform every week. Slava recently attended the White House signing of the historic JOBS Act as the representative of the crowdfunding industry. In 2011 Indiegogo was the only crowdfunding partner company for Startup America, President Obama’s initiative to stimulate entrepreneurship in America. Prior to co-founding Indiegogo, Slava was a strategy consultant responsible for leading growth initiatives on behalf of clients such as MasterCard, Goldman Sachs, and FedEx. Slava is also the founder of "Music Against Myeloma," an annual charity event that raises funds for and awareness of cancer research. Slava received his B.S.E. from The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.

Dan Leuck

CEO of Ikayzo

Dan is the CEO of Ikayzo, a software development and interactive design firm servicing customers including Bank of America, Nomura Securities, PIMCO, Sony and Oracle. He is also the Chairman and cofounder of Contix, a company that does social media analytics for finance customers. Previously, Dan served as SVP of R&D for ValueCommerce, Asia's largest web advertising platform, Global Head of Development for London-based LastMinute.com, Europe's largest B2C website, and President of the US division of DML. Daniel has extensive experience managing teams of 150+ developers and designers in five countries. He has served on numerous advisory boards and panels for companies such as Macromedia and Sun Microsystems. Daniel is active in the open source community and is involved in the standardization of numerous mobile, desktop and enterprise technology standards. He is also active in the local community as a board member of Kokua Coop and ThinkTech Hawaii as well as running the TechHui.com social network for Hawaii-based developers and interactive designers.

Evan Nagle

Co-Founder of Mentalpez

Evan Nagle is the cofounder and co-owner of a number of startups, including Mentalpez, Bidtowork, Rolltech, Screenfuse, and Tracky. He was named a Rising Star by Future of Web Insights, and his prototypal C# work was referenced by Brendan Eich (CTO of Mozilla, creator of JavaScript) in Eich’s recent keynote TXJS presentation. He has an MFA in poetry, a background as a technical consultant for Microsoft and Amazon, and an unquenchable thirst for Mountain Dew.

Tina Fitch

Co-Founder & CEO of umicam

Tina Fitch is the co-founder of Switchfly, a global software-as-a-service provider that helps travel companies, loyalty programs and financial services institutions engage with their highest value customers. As the CEO, Tina led Switchfly to work with more than 300,000 travel suppliers, loyalty programs and payment providers globally, including United Airlines, JetBlue, Starwood Hotels, Expedia, Priceline and American Express. Collectively, more than 20 billion reward points are redeemed through the Switchfly platform annually.

Prior to Switchfly, Tina was on the founding team and led international business development efforts for a joint venture between leading private equity and investment firms to create hospitality operating companies and assets throughout Asia and Europe. Oakwood Worldwide grew to become the global leader in its class.

In 2010, Tina returned home to Hawaii to help further develop the technology ecosystem, including acting as a mentor in Blue Startups, a State-sponsored accelerator program, and advising SKAI Ventures, a leading bio and green-tech incubator. She is also launching another technology startup fostering mobile, visual collaboration: umicam.

Tina graduated from University of California at Berkeley with a degree in Economics, and also studied at Beijing University and Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea. Her early career included economic and financial analysis for the UNDP, Seoul Development Institute, NBER and Ford Foundation.

Kelly Mitchell

Founder of Agent Caffeine

Kelly Mitchell is the Founder of Agent Caffeine recently was recognized by Inman in the Top 100 Most Influential Real Estate Leader. Speaking at events including Inman Connect NYC 2013, Inman Connect SF 2012 and Banff Western Connection in Canada where she spoke on Podcasting for Real Estate, Reinventing Your Marketing and moderated a panel includingPhil Soper CEO of Royal LaPage and Prudential Canada on Professionalism. She revels in sharing war stories of successfully traversing 4 industries, sharing successes, learning from failures and how-to's. She is an actively licensed real estate professional with 8 years of award-winning experience.
She draws from 20+ years of strategic marketing, business development and digital marketing expertise. Her background includes successfully launching four startup companies each in a unique industry including technology and real estate.
The inaugural President of the Social Media Club of Hawaii, she founded Next Level Hawaii, a business centric social media event bringing world-class social media speakers together in Honolulu. Ms. Mitchell was responsible for acquiring a commercialization technology agreement with NASA and the development of products using NASA's DC-Tune, a digital compression algorithm.
She serves on the Board of Advisors for the Hogan Entrepreneur Program at her alma mater, Chaminade University.

From Honolulu to D.C. to Manhattan to Santa Monica and now finally landing back in sweet home Honolulu. Danielle Scherman was born and raised in Hawaii, and started off in public relations before pursuing her passion in special events which provided her with many opportunities including launching a boutique event-planning agency called Soiree Events, launching an online social network in the Hamptons known as Hamptons Undercover (www.HamptonsUndercover.com), launching a social and business networking group for women in Hawaii called Social Wahines (www.SocialWahines.com), and launching a 4,000 person online network for event planners in New York City known as Event Headquarters (www.EventHeadquarters.com).

Rechung was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii. He loves to travel and has spent time in New York, Tokyo, San Francisco and Shanghai. Rechung likes to read, and enjoy good conversation over good food and good drink.

As the CEO and Enzyme of The Box Jelly, Rechung is focused on the longevity of the company and growing a thriving community. Rechung is also the Hawaii Camp Director of Camp BizSmart, amongst various other projects.